Research network “Gender, Displacement, Refugee Policies. Processes of Gendered In- and Exclusions in Lower Saxony”, funded by the federal state of Lower Saxony.

The research network’s goal is to examine from a gender theoretical perspective the reception and integration policies in Germany given the increased challenges in the housing, reception, and, in the broadest sense, integration of the grown number of refugees. Both politicians and scholars in gender related refugee research point out a “protection gap” for refugee women; the share of women in Lower Saxony’s reception centres is estimated to be at about 25 - 30%. Building and expanding on this observation, the research network looks at a broad set of issues and questions about the participation of refugee women. In doing so, the focus is on gendered processes of differential inclusion in the context of reception policies and their attendant discourses. The empirical analysis of these processes is divided up into four central aspects: volunteer and communal refugee work, labour market integration, prevention of violence, and media discourse.

The Oldenburg sub-project focuses on a prominent field in gender-sensitive work: “Refugee Women, Family Dynamics, and Violence: Intervention, Prevention, and Overcoming Trauma in the Context of Reception”. Although an increasing amount of gender-sensitive help is available, it does not necessarily offer safety and is frequently assessed as insufficient and inadequate. Furthermore, the connection between violence and gender in migration contexts is commonly reduced to ethnicized, mostly domestic male violence against women. The sub-project expands this perspective in two ways. One, it focuses on the significance of violence on the one hand, and family on the other in processes of displacement. Two, it builds on broader concepts of violence and family that serve to comprise, among other things, structural forms of violence and displacement-related fragmentation of both family and resources.

(Project duration: 1/2/2016 bis 30/1/2020, Head: Prof. Dr. Silke Wenk, Contributor: Dr. Ulrike Koopmann, in cooperation with Dr. Lydia Potts)